Eat your Values: Embracing a Plant-Based Diet

_Beyond turning out lights, recycling, carpooling, etc., there's another
thing we can do three times a day that could have by far the most
profound impact on the environment, not to mention our health and our
conscience... Eat plants!

Most of us have grown up on a
meat-centered diet, with fond family memories of animal-based meals:
Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas ham, chicken-noodle soup, beef stew,
steak and potatoes, and more. Our familiarity with animal-based
food is so pervasive that most of us don't even think about it: our
breakfasts of cereal, milk, bacon, eggs, and yogurt.
Lunch sandwiches with chicken, turkey, ham, tuna, mayonnaise, and cheese. And
dinners that are not complete without a sizeable hunk of meat and a sweet dish
of ice cream to top it all off. These foods are a huge part of our
lives, yet these habits have far more to do with the meat and dairy
industry than our mother's desire to nourish us. We have been told for
decades that we need meat to get enough protein and milk to get our
calcium, and that a diet without these fundamentals is unhealthy and
even dangerous.

But... wait.

Protein, made up of amino acids, is a building block of life, and is found in every living organism, plant and animal. And calcium is a mineral... found in the ground. The truth is that all the nutrients we need, all the vitamins, minerals, and organic compounds, are plant-based (or bacteria-based, in the case of vitamin B-12). Obtaining these nutrients from animal-based foods is completely unnecessary, and such foods also tend to be high in saturated fat and cholesterol which is further detrimental to our health. In fact, most of us consume too much protein in our diets (15-21%), far more than the recommended daily allowance (9-10%) and the amount actually required by our bodies (5-6%). This high protein diet creates an acid-like condition in the body that leeches the calcium from our bones and, when left unused, is stored as fat. While this may have once given us an evolutionary advantage, today it is causing us to suffer greatly from diet-related diseases such as obesity, heart disease, type II diabetes, gout, hypertension, and even some forms of cancer.

The truth is, we eat these foods because they are cheap (backed by powerful industries and corporate lobbyists), convenient (there's approximately one fast food restaurant per 2,000 people in the US), and, when laden with salt and oil, they taste good. But transitioning to a plant-based diet could be the most radical and liberating choice we can make for the health of our bodies and our planet. Animal agriculture is incredibly resource-intensive; most of the grain, corn and soybeans grown in our country does not go to feed humans, its goes to feed animals. Confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) endanger communities with concentrated manure and runoff, abuse antibiotics, corrupt our politics, and practice a form of animal cruelty that we can scarcely even imagine unless we have seen it with our own eyes. Truly, there is nothing in our physiology that requires us to consume animals or their products--its not 'natural,' its just a habit. And habits are made... well, you know the rest.

So when it comes to nourishing our bodies, why not just go directly to the source? Plants are full of all the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that help us live healthfully and compassionately, and eating a diet rich in whole grains, vegetables, legumes, fruits, mushrooms, nuts, and seeds is not only unbelievably simple, but incredibly delicious. There is really no sacrifice to be made, and indeed, there is much to be gained, in body and in mind.

There is a lot of information out there to help you transition to a vegetarian or vegan diet, and we strongly encourage you to do your own research on the subject; however, here's a short list of resources that we can recommend to get you started: